Glad it's working for you Moose. 7 months on for me since I had shingles and it's still going (the neuralgia), though much less than at first. I was on a dose at least that strong and nothing. Guess it goes to show how people react differently to different substances. And I'm a skinny little dude too and am usually sensitive to normal doses of thing. Nothing but good experiences with the lettuce, but then I never partook for pain before.

Mike, it actually enhanced the action of oxycodone. I lower the dose of oxycodone significantly and it still worked. I went from 6X5mg to 1X2.5mg a day within a week. Haven't noticed any cross reaction with ibuprofen or acetaminophen.

Yeah, my wife has been on it for the past three weeks - a real life saver in our case. Backed her down from the hairy edge of pain to where she could cope again and that was on just 300mg a day. She's between surgeries at the moment and we're working her up to 900mg / day which should lock her in so she can get through it all for the next couple of months.

Saw the pain doc yesterday, he was saying you could down 10,000mgs of the stuff with a glass of water, but your body can only absorb about 600-800mg max in any one shot and you'll just sh#t the rest out. Way better than the Oxycontin/Oxycodene/Soma mix.

Tarbuster, just had a tooth extracted a few hours ago. The put me in a semi awake state where you dont remember the surgury.
What was it that killed Michael Jackson , Propofal or something. they gave me some of that with some ketamine and some other one that started with D,,, A veritable friday after noon cocktail.

Coming out of that stuff is a trip, its like an out of body sensation where nothing exists but your mind. Had that same combo once before that was a little stronger, as I slowly came out of it I realized my mind was in a white space. I could still think enough after a while to think, Is this the reality I will exist in from now on ... after some indeterminate amount of time,, 5 minutes or 20 , who knows I realized I was looking up at a flourecent light in the dentists office.

Ah...ketamine...had that stuff for wisdom teeth extraction when I was living in Papua New Guinea many years ago. Supposedly while on the stuff you want a very calm and serene environment. While I was under I got so relaxed that I swallowed my tongue (they tell me) and that caused a minor panic among those in the dental office because I couldn't breath. I went on a very, Very BAAAAD trip. Everything was a liquid thought that were occurring and flowing a zillion times a second. Seemed like I was trapped in this never ending feedback loop and would never ever get out. Took me forever to come down and seemed like I'd been "gone" 10,000 years. Dang if I was using that stuff recreationally I woulda stopped cold that moment. Bad experience. Nightmare doesn't even began to describe it. A total freakout.

Naitch , ' in an everlasting forward loop" descibes it well. I kind of enjoyed it afterward and felt very calm during. There was no body only my "thoughts", very coherent and normal, and then my enviroment, that had no time or any thing recognizable , exept white space,"Like white noise without any sound."

Lol Mike. I was on gabapentin only when I smoked that weed. I had a trip I wan't forget (although I can recall only pieces of it). First I had visual and audio halucinations. Then touch and taste. Wired, but not bad. After that I got scared I could lose control and do something dangerous. My short memory was gone, so I couldn't hold any thoughts except that fear. I shiver just thinking about that. SCARY!!!

Dude! Sounds familiar except i was on 9mg of long acting hydro, 4mg of short acting (which i took all at once) and pregab that morning.. Holy sh#t bud! No hallucinations but i could hear everything that was going on in my occupational therapy all at the same time! There was 50 different conversations going on at the same time and i could differentiate each one but it was super sensory overload!

I couldn't focus on the task at hand and i just wanted to close my eyes and pass out! I was tripping balls! Then the doctors started bombarding me with the questions!! I just wanted to hide but i couldn't even leave my bed!! Talk about shitty! ;)

I'm currently in the "dig back out of the hole" endless-physical-therapy-phase of dual hip replacement. I found Oxycodone and OxyContin perfectly livable post surgery; no problem staying clear and I think it actually improved my reading comprehension! Try that with medical marijuana, which is something more akin to reading with sandbags on your head. Either way, go for a 24-hour extraction in hot coconut oil and syringe it into capsules. Smoking just doesn't comport with medicine.

Prior to the joint replacement I tried Cymbalta for ongoing unresolved systemic/musculoskeletal pain and I could barely peel myself off the carpet. Had to back away from that stuff nice and easy.

This weekend I will begin a six-week course of a wakefulness promoting agent called Provigil to see if I can get better repair during sleep cycles. First it's gotta pull me out of my face down in the shag carpet posture and out into the sunlight. Heh. What do they know, really, when it comes down to difficult diagnoses. So many of these specialists have a hammer and see a nail!

Side effects??? The neurologist/sleep medicine Doc I'm seeing says they'd do well just to call them effects.

To make this informal poll more accurate, I just recalled I did have a paradoxical effect with gabapentin.
I woke up three hours earlier every morning and felt about the same with my normal sleep regimen, which is trashed.

Cymbalta is an antidepressant that is also on label for musculoskeletal pain. My interpretation is that it works well for things like fibromyalgia. My exhaustion response was an outlier.

I believe Gabapentin is in anti-spasmodic. I have guessed that it reduced all these extra contractions from my bruxism and this is why I needed less sleep.

I've trotted out both of these drug responses to doctors and often they just don't know how to comment. The doctor who prescribed Cymbalta said to me: "Well, it's a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, meaning it keeps it in your system. Apparently you don't need any more serotonin".

The sleep medicine neurologist commented on the latter: "We can't even draw such inferences, because although the drug companies want you to think these drugs target specific processes, they do all kinds of things". As to the Gabapentin reaction, he just said that I can't really draw any inferences from my need for less sleep.

In short you just can't critique these things very well from the standpoint of a layman.

Lol roy! I'm surprised you find the oxy ok. It really makes me dopey. That could be the fact that i'm mixing it with the pregabalin, but many people i've talked to have had similar effects. The hydromophone had been good to me besides the constipation issues.. I'm completely with it for rehab, not spacey like i was on the oxycodin. Plus it's long acting so only every 8 hours instead of waking me up every 3 hours for meds. That sucked.

They're trying to wean me off the stuff now which i agree with, but i don't want to run into pain issues again like i did a couple of weeks ago when i voluntarily tried to do the same. They ordered it be reduced and then i was hurting real good, and because they ordered it all the nurses could do was give me the short acting hydro which i hate because it makes me feel super dopey too, and gives me horrible nightmares.

I told them this time to leave the dosage alone and i would take less to figure it out for myself.